Search Engine Features and Capabilities

The Baseball-Reference.com search engine is not a full-featured search engine like Google that indexes all of the information on the pages and then tries to match your search to what they think you want.

Instead, we use a set of rules to try and match your request to the set of pages on the site. Player searches go to the main player page. What looks like team searches go to team pages, etc.

Players

Player Searches have always been handled fairly well. We search both the player's common name along with their given and nick names. We match on the beginning of the player's name, so partial names are allowed at the beginning of the search, though some searches will return a lot of names (we give you 50 at a time). For example, you can get to
Ted Williams's
page by using:

Ted Williams

The Ted Williams
- sends you directly to the most popular page matching "Ted Williams"

T Williams

Williams,T

T Will

Theodore Williams

Teddy Ballgame

Splendid Splinter

We also catalog all unsuccessful searches, so most common misspellings are included in the database as well. We'd be happy to discuss licensing our database of misspellings.

Teams, Leagues and Postseason

We have added in all of the current team nicknames and ID's, league ID's, and postseason series ID's, so you can now find teams, leagues, and postseason series. All of the following searches will return correct results.

BOS 2007

Teams

franch NYY

Mets 2001

1919 CHW

1970 Mets

KCR

BlueJays

Franchise Dodgers

1910 WS

ALCS 2002

1907 WorldSeries

Others and Easter Eggs

Additionally all of the site directories are included in the search engine. Beyond that we track all search requests and anything that shows up at least 100 times will eventually be included in the search engine as a direct link. There are also a few quirky things that we've added just for fun.

Bowie Kuhn

awards

leagues

mvp

Scott Boras

Brien Taylor

homeruns

triple crown

roy hobbs

Feel free to give us
some feedback
if there is a search term, feature, or shortcut you want us to add, or if something doesn't appear to be working correctly.

Full-year historical Major League statistics provided by Pete Palmer and Gary Gillette of 24-7 Baseball.

Some defensive statistics Copyright BIS, 2010-2011
.

Player head shots courtesy of David Davis. Many thanks to him. We have only selected seasons (players who debuted before 1960) for which we believe the image has reverted into the public domain. We will quickly remove any images for which that can be shown to not be the case.Please let us know if you are aware of any such images
on this site.